Guest srinic Posted October 3, 2005 Report Share Posted October 3, 2005 (edited) I sucessfully installed mandrake 10.1 on my home computer. Except for this last snag. My machine has two hard drives, one of them is a 100GB western digital drive. I had earlier used a dynamic disk overlay to make it work with windows. I have now made partitions with partition magic. But mandrake does not see the partitions as it is not running the DDO. Linux (hardrake) seems to recognize the drive so i might be able to format it and make it work. However i dont want to (i) lose my data on that drive and (ii) be able to make it work with my old windows ME bootup whenever necessary. Is there an solution ? Thanks Srinic Edited October 3, 2005 by srinic Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted October 3, 2005 Report Share Posted October 3, 2005 Welcome to the board Is there a particular reason why you set as a Dynamic Disk? In Windows, you can right click and choose convert to basic, and then that would most likely help Linux recognise it better. If there's a particular reason as to why you've used Dynamic Disk, then don't convert to Basic. How much data is on the drive? Can you back up the data at all to DVD? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted October 3, 2005 Report Share Posted October 3, 2005 Welcome to the board Is there a particular reason why you set as a Dynamic Disk? A Dynamic Disk Overlay is a special primary loader, which manages HD's not manageable by old BIOS revisions (not all their capacity is utilized). Some DDO loaders work OK with Linux, some others not... can you name what you're using? The solution is actually passing to the OS (via the LILO or Grub configuration file) the REAL HD geometry characteristics, but this won't always work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted October 3, 2005 Report Share Posted October 3, 2005 Ah, sorry, I confused DDO with MS's Dynamic Disk. Please ignore my rambling :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted October 3, 2005 Report Share Posted October 3, 2005 (edited) Disk overlays are a terrible hack IMHO. They cause problems in both windows and linux; I avoid them like the plague. The only stable solution is to invest in a pci ide controller as that won't be bound by your bios hard drive size limitations or to get a bios update if one is available. I assume you've looked into the bios update and none is available. At any rate, these drive overlay programs are not necessary in linux. Once the linux kernel is loaded, linux kisses the bios hard drive size limits good bye. Windows is much more bound to the bios size limits and drive overlay programs are a hack around that limitation. You only have to make sure you install linux on a partition within the bios size limits so the kernel can load. That would not be a problem at all in your situation since you have linux installed on another drive. I assume mandrake sees the entire 100GB. All that being said, do NOT attempt any partitioning operations on the drive with hardrake; you will undoubtedly lose all your data if you do so. Before fooling around with anything on the drive, backup your data to cd-r or dvd-r. That's probably a good idea anyway as I've lost data on drives with an overlay even within a pure windows environment. Bottom line, that drive overlay is probably not compatible with linux and is necessary for the the drive to be used in windows, at least to full capacity. You really need a hardware solution, i.e. a bios update or a new pci ide controller card. That will allow you to get rid of the overlay program for once and for all. Edited October 3, 2005 by pmpatrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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